Justice for all?

A number of policy changes from the coalition¹ has prompted some debate on criminal justice over the last few weeks. Sadly as is so often the case with this particular area of policy a lot of it has been infantile.

Fortunately though it does kick up some interesting issues for me to begin this blog on. The policies in question have included a possible end to ASBOs and a new approach to imprisonment. There's also been quite a lot of coverage on two somewhat related stories, 'parties for prisoners' and the rearrest of John Venables.

The thing that continuously draws my attention is that public policy and the surrounding dialogue largely fails to put any weight on the well being of criminals. In fact just using the phrase “well being of criminals” seems even to me a trifle odd, so well conditioned are we to the assumption that the plight of a criminal is unimportant. From a rational perspective though it seems odd that we pay such scant regard to the lives of so many people.

Just take a glance at some of the news coverage I've already mentioned. In particular the coverage of imprisonment policy changes. There's considerable discussion of whether more or less prison is good for society at large, but no-one ever mentions the idea that perhaps imprisoning less people might be good for those who don't have to endure the horror of prison. One might expect that from Michael Howard or the Labour party who advocate locking significantly more people away but even Ken Clarke who advocates a lower use of prison terms doesn't dare to mention the impact on prisoners.

Naturally there's always a conflict between the interests of prisoners and the rest of society, and I think, in common with most other people, that punishments ought to be reasonably severe for the purpose of preventing crime. Where I differ is that I think that the harm to society that punishments prevent ought to be weighed against the harm they do to criminals.

Let's say that each time we lock away a thief we prevent future crime, both by deterrence to other potential criminals and by physically preventing that individual from re-offending whilst in prison. Let's imagine that there actually was some way to reduce the harm of crime and the harm of punishment to a single unit, we'll call it a utility unit. Let's also imagine hypothetically², that locking one thief away for five years prevents 10 utility units of crime, while doing 5 utility units of harm to the thief. Clearly in this case prison seems like a decent option, we salvage a positive five units of utility for society. Finally let's imagine an alternative prison scenario, that we sentence the thief to a draconian 15 years in prison. This salvages 15 points of utility that would otherwise have been lost to crime but inflicts 15 points of utility harm on the thief, in other words society as a whole gains nothing from it. Clearly we should prefer to prevent 5 utility units of harm than to prevent nothing.

The conclusion of our little thought experiment is that there is a limit to how long thieves should be locked away for. Hopefully a lot of people agree with this already. The point of difference though is that most probably have an idea that a certain length of punishment is 'just' or 'fair' or 'proportional to the crime' and that that's why we shouldn't just let minor criminals rot in jail. I say that these things aren't any better than rules of thumb, what we should really care about is how the punishment effects everybody and by everybody I really do mean everybody. Criminals just as much as law abiding citizens.

That this is true, that the utility of a criminal is just as important as that of each of the individuals he threatens is axiomatic for utilitarians that is, to paraphrase some quite clever people, we hold this truth to be self evident. Maybe you're not convinced and therein lies the problem with any axiom. I'd be happy enough though just to ask you to think about why it isn't, why any group of people should ever count for less than any other group of people, whatever they've done. If you can't answer me that, then maybe you'll concede that we need to give far more thought to how we treat those who break society's rules.

¹ For the benefit of anyone to whom this doesn't swiftly become obvious I'm writing from the UK. I think the kind of issues I discuss will be relevant to a lot of places worldwide but those without regular exposure to British news might want to make use of my links if they want a handle on any of the issues' backgrounds.

² Clearly we don't have and never could have access to these kind of statistics or units of comparison in real life, I only present them here because it allows us to better envisage a situation and thereby tease out the underlying dilemma.

Introduction

Well welcome to this, my first tentative attempt at writing a blog. The basic idea is to blog about current affairs. So far so simple. Unfortunately news wasn't the only blog subject getting kicked around the inside of my head at the time I picked a subject. I also wanted to do a proper philosophy blog¹, a food blog and perhaps a travel blog. The compromise that emerged was a current affairs site with a particular philosophical slant that occasionally (or mostly, we shall see) digresses on to the not unimportant topic of things to eat. If nothing else it'll be unique.

The philosophical slant in question is utilitarianism. I don't want to talk about philosophy in too much depth in this blog, partly because it deserves a level of attention to detail that I can't give it right now, but I think it's worth giving a brief utility intro.

Basically utilitarianism is the philosophical position that we can reduce the morality of all actions down to a single thing, their utility value. Actions that do good are morally good, actions that do bad are morally bad, irrespective of the type of action. A murder that saves the lives of millions more is actually a morally good action, irrespective of what some might consider to be the inherent wrongness of murder.

Of course this gets more complicated when we examine it in depth. What do we really mean by utility? Do we mean pleasure or perhaps the absence of pain? Maybe we should let people decide upon their own utility and simply service their preferences.

We're about to fall over a precipice of complicated and ultimately inconclusive argument so I'll cut straight to the simplified version of my own perspective. Firstly I think we should seek courses of action based on their outcomes and not vague assertions about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts. That means I'm open to any course of political action which can be shown to be the most expedient in achieving utility.

Secondly 'human rights' don't actually exist anywhere except inside our heads. That's not to say we shouldn't accord people rights, some rights are very important, but they are just legal constructs. The concept of innate rights, the idea that we would have rights irrespective of whether they were recognised by the rest of society, is in Jeremy Bentham's memorable words, nonsense upon stilts.

Having uttered the phrase 'politically expedient' and denied rights exist I now probably sound like some crazed right wing loon, yet I'm actually extremely liberal. That shouldn't really come as a suprise, after all I'm following in the philosophical tradition of J.S. Mill. Anyway I've rambled for far too long here so if you need further convincing or explanation I suggest you wait for some actual posts.

¹ By which I mean a blog discussing more technical philosophical issues for a narrow academic audience.